The books in this founding library, Manguel writes, communicate an eclectic, generous conception (probably unconscious, certainly not explicit) of what a new city should be. In one, he recalls the syphilitic knight Pedro de Mendoza, who sailed to South America in 1536 under instructions from the emperor Charles I to set up a Spanish colony, taking with him not only 13 ships and 2,000 men, but “seven volumes of medium size bound in black leather” which were to become the continent’s first library. The form Manguel has chosen is an essay interrupted by 10 “digressions”, which ramble anecdotally across time and space. This nightmare, like Stevenson’s, has produced a book – a slim, fragmentary meditation on the power of reading and the importance of libraries. It is like playing a film backwards, consigning visible narratives and methodological reality to the regions of the distant and unseen, a voluntary forgetting.” “Packing,” he writes, “is an exercise in oblivion. That meant packing up his precious library of 35,000 books in the knowledge that he might never see them all together again. One of the world’s great readers, whose finest work has been about the writing of others, Manguel faced his own worst nightmare three years ago when – defeated by “sordid” French bureaucracy – he and his partner left the medieval village presbytery that had been their home for the last 15 years for a tiny flat in Manhattan.
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